More Than Half of College’s IT Graduates Scooped Up By New Brunswick’s Innovatia
Blair Price, an instructor at New Brunswick Community College, had never seen anything like it: St John-based Innovation walked into the college and hired seven of nine students in Price’s IT Network Support department.
“We’ve had companies come in before and hire some students, but never the whole class,” he says.
But Price isn’t surprised: though the demand for qualified IT workers in New Brunswick has accelerated, Price’s class was only half-full. Getting the word out to prospective students about the job boom isn’t easy.
“There seems to be a growing demand for IT workers in New Brunswick,” says Price. “However, the enrolment in colleges and universities probably isn’t what it should be.”
Innovatia is one of the fastest growing companies in Atlantic Canada and offers technology support and training modules to clients around the world. The company’s chief executive officers, Dave Grebenc and Roxanne Fairweather, bought the company three years ago and since then, have hired more than 200 employees – and adding more staff all the time.
“We just finished bringing on our 500th person and we’re in the process of bringing on 30 more,” says Grebenc.
That need for new staff and the company’s desire to hire locally is what brought Innovatia recruiters to the community college in St. Andrew’s, N.B. Seven of the nine students in Price’s class had job offers in their hands by the end of the day, each position starting at more than $30,000.
Recruit Matthew Anderson said that having a job before graduation feels great and beats handing out resumes and waiting for an interview.
“We were just surprised that they would come see us,” Anderson says.
New Brunswick’s technology industry is one of the province’s fastest growing sectors – something that instructor Price hopes will encourage more students to train for it. For now, he says, “[i]t’s unfortunate that more New Brunswickers aren’t picking up on IT as a career track,” he said.
The growing need for IT specialists is booming across Canada, with New Brunswick just being the latest to experience a major boom. If this is a career path you may be interested in, check out some of these colleges who offer a variety of IT-related diploma programs:
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